Paul Haber often spent the night before a big handball tournament drinking in bars, chain-smoking, playing cards for money, and chasing women.

He’d stagger onto the court the next day — his Gatorade sometimes spiked with vodka — and not just win, but dominate. He was a nine-time national champion who knew all the angles.

But being a big man in a small sport has its limitations, and when Haber died almost eight years ago in Santee, he was broke and largely forgotten. His final resting place was an unmarked grave near a grafitti-splashed pine tree in San Diego’s Home of Peace Cemetery.

Sports Illustrated magazine, which had once chronicled Haber’s athleticism and antics in revealing feature articles that read like short stories in The New Yorker, marked his passing with a one-paragraph obituary. Its final line: “A collection had to be taken to pay for his funeral — his cat, some cat food, and the $42 in his wallet were all he had to his name.”

At home in Texas, Andy Hollan read that and seethed.

Hollan was a teen, just learning handball, when he first met Haber, already a legend, back in the 1970s. They became friends. Imagine a budding baseball player meeting an in-his-prime Mickey Mantle. To Hollan, Haber was a hero, and always will be.

“That final magazine story was a bitter pill to swallow,” Hollan said, so he decided to chase it down with something more flavorful.

For several years he has been collecting stories, photos and video of Haber, using them first for a journal he wrote, then an audio tape (“Hot Hands, Hot Nights”) and now a documentary film. He estimates he’s spent about $25,000 out of his own pocket on the project.

He also collected donations from around the country — $10 here, $20 there — to put a marker on Haber’s grave. It cost $600 and went in about a month ago.

“All I can tell you is if you were 15 or 16 and playing a certain sport, and the best in the world at that sport got with you, and a couple of years later you were playing the sport with him, and he began to teach you not only about handball, but about life, well, you’d want to make sure he wasn’t forgotten either,” Hollan said.

Handball is an ancient sport, and a rough one — “a game that might have been devised by the Marquis de Sade as something fun to do while his whips were at the cleaners,” in the words of one sports writer.

It is players wearing leather gloves pounding a hard rubber ball at speeds up to 100 mph against a wall — one wall, in the game that Alexander the Great and Abraham Lincoln supposedly played, and nowadays more commonly four walls and a ceiling.

Haber was born in Brooklyn and learned the game from his father, Sam Haber, himself a legend. (Both are in the United States Handball Association Hall of Fame.) The family moved to Chicago and Paul Haber left home at around 16 to make his way.

When he won his first national singles title in 1966, he ushered in an era that relied more on finesse and precision than power. He mastered a soft shot off the ceiling, “really invented that portion of the game,” said Gordy Pfeifer, a retired pro player who lives in Fircrest, Wa.

An intense competitor, Haber was big on intimidation, once leaving two doughnuts outside the court before a final as a prediction of his opponent’s game scores that day — two doughnuts as in two zeros. He screamed at referees, threw tantrums, generally made the handball establishment wish he’d gone into tennis. Except that he was a valuable magnet to other players, the media and fans.

Unlike most other competitors, who had day jobs and played handball on the side, Haber made his living from the sport, traveling city to city for tournaments, exhibitions and clinics. He wrote a book, “Inside Handball,” and made instructional videos. There was a Paul Haber action doll.

When he wasn’t playing he was carousing. He would sometimes bet other bar patrons whether a flame held up to his thickly calloused hands would make him flinch. He was arrested outside one match for failing to pay child support. (Married four times, he had at least three children.) He bragged out loud about being “the greatest Jewish athlete in the world.”

In 1972, his flair for the dramatic took him to Memphis, Tenn., for a match against the country’s top racquetball player, a San Diego dentist named E.F. “Bud” Muehleisen. Haber played with his hands, Muehleisen with his racquet, but what most intriqued reporters was the difference in personalities. The dentist was a straight arrow whose biggest vice was ice cream. Haber was, well, Haber. “Mr. Clean meets the Devil,” Sports Illustrated called it. The Devil won.

In a rematch eight months later in Long Beach, Muehleisen prevailed, but that did little to diminish Haber’s stature.

Hard-living and age finally caught up with him, and by the late 1970s he was done as a competitive handball player. He settled in San Diego and did a little of this, a little of that. At the end he was peddling cleaning products and living in an apartment at the factory. He died sleeping in a desk chair, from emphysema. He was 66.

Hollan remembers talking to Haber a couple weeks before he died. They’d stayed in touch over the years, as Hollan grew up, went to the University of Texas (where he played handball and majored in history), and later became a businessman. Now in his 50s, he works security at a small college in Texas.

“Paul Haber was one of a kind, and his life is a real laugh-cry story,” Hollan said. “It’s unfortunate how he was forgotten at the end.”

He’s proud of the grave marker he helped arrange. The wording on it says Haber “will be remembered by those who really knew him and what he meant to them.”

The grave is along a chain-link fence under a pine tree. In keeping with the handball legend’s supersized life, there are actually two markers — the one Hollan got, and another apparently done around the same time by Haber’s relatives.

The birth date on the markers is different. It wouldn’t be Haber if there wasn’t some conflict, even at the end.